Many years ago, a day’s episode of the World’s Second Greatest Comic Strip Ever (after “Calvin and Hobbes”) showed a few of the secondary characters from “Bloom County” stuffed into a big chair watching TV.
They were arguing about what it was they were watching.
It mattered because if the program was, as one character said, a contemporary documentary about violence in the Middle East, then, of course, what they were seeing was horrible. They should be shocked and appalled.
But if, as another character insisted, they were watching a movie, or maybe an episode of the old World War II desert adventure “The Rat Patrol,” then it was socially acceptable to enjoy all the mayhem and make sounds like, “Yeah! Blast that sucker!”
Finally, the very frustrated groundhog exclaims, “Will someone please tell me whether I‘m supposed to be enjoying this or not ...”
Interesting what I’m enjoying these days.
Football players, in my experience, were not exemplars of moral leadership. The few I knew personally did not fit the stereotype of the dumb jock. They were intelligent enough. But they were egotistical, cliquish and, often, bullies. Especially if you were the guy who already thought of gym class as undeserved punishment.
So now it feels a bit odd to look around and see some football players and other athletes standing morally, not just physically, head and shoulders above much of the rest of society.
Far from being dumb jocks, quarterback Colin Kaepernick and those who followed him in his loud-as-a-whisper practice of falling to one knee during the playing of the national anthem have, if anything, flown right over the heads of folks who should know better.
Kneeling is an act of respect and concern, not contempt or derision. The point is to be sad. Sad when another player, teammate or rival, is down.
Sad that the nation represented by the song and the flags and the (often) overt display of military pomp is so clearly not living up to its ideals. Not behaving as if all men are created equal.
Not noticing that black men who aren’t talented enough or lucky enough to make millions playing a kid’s game are, with astonishing frequency and lack of accountability, being shot down in the streets.
The only question is whether those radio hosts, TV talking heads and presidential tweeters who claim the protests are anti-flag or anti-military are really that dense, or assume that the rest of us are.
For some Twitter accounts that provide a nice antidote to the president’s spew — happier, sometimes inspiring, with some clever self-aware commercialism — follow folks like LeBron James.
Meanwhile, for a guy who became politically aware in the 1960s, I find myself uncharacteristically in awe of FBI agents.
The FBI, under the seemingly eternal leadership of J. Edgar Hoover, used to be the bad guys. Spying on the anti-war crowd. Viewing civil rights activists as disloyal communists. Wire-tapping Martin Luther King. Even writing King a letter suggesting he kill himself.
Those guys were tall and white and severely buttoned down, like James Comey and Robert Mueller. But Comey was properly aghast when the new president made it clear that the then-director of the Bureau was supposed to demonstrate his loyalty personally to the temporary holder of the office, not the Constitution and the law.
There’s a reason the book Comey is now contracted to write is to be titled “A Higher Loyalty.”
And those of us who see what a mistake the electorate made last year can not worry quite so much about the fact that too many Republicans are complicit and too many Democrats are incompetent when those pictures of Mueller and his army of absolutely straight-arrow prosecutors flash on the screen.
If, 30 years ago, you had asked me who would hold the moral high ground — the kid who spent the Vietnam War nursing his bone spurs or the Princeton grad who volunteered to go because it was not fair to send someone else in his stead — I might have called it for the dodger.
The war was a crime against humanity and those who participated were complicit. Or, at least, those who avoided it were understood. Several recent elections supported that perspective. Folks who went to war — George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, John McCain, John Kerry, Al Gore — lost to those who didn’t — Bill Clinton, George W. Bush.
Now, Mueller’s status as a decorated Marine officer adds to his aura of moral authority to follow the clues where they lead.
And he will likely never crack a smile as folks across the country say, ““Yeah! Blast that sucker!”
George Pyle, The Tribune’s editorial page editor, once thought people who drank beer were stupid. Times change. gpyle@sltrib.com